


California Adventure

by lirin



Category: Tomorrowland (2015)
Genre: Athena's okay, Gen, Post-Movie, Road Trip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 06:45:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8879992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/pseuds/lirin
Summary: Casey and Athena set out to find a human who is masquerading as a recruiter. It's too bad Frank's not around to help...





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [intrikate88](https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrikate88/gifts).



It was the littlest recruiter—the youngest in appearance, although of course the current batch was all equal in age—who first brought word of the problem. Athena seemed rather put out that she hadn't noticed it first. Casey thought that her irritation was exacerbated by not being able to let everybody know how put out she was (since that would have meant letting news of the problem leak out), so instead she was stuck with complaining to Casey. At length. It didn’t help that Frank was away right now. Not only did that always make Athena more grumpy, but it gave her one less target.

Casey sighed, and turned back to the littlest recruiter. She was staring up at them in awe, with that meeting-her-heroes-from-history-class look on her face that had taken Casey at least a year to get used to.

Okay, so she still wasn’t used to it. She wasn’t entirely used to AA units and portals and the fact that she didn’t live on Earth anymore either, but that was life. “So what exactly makes you think one of the recruiters is an impostor?” she asked, skeptically.

“She’s been acting...well, different, ever since she returned from her previous recruiting mission. She didn’t check in until I reminded her, and she didn’t seem to have actually recruited anybody. But most of all, she slipped away for several hours in the middle of the night when the rest of us were catching up on reports, and I think she was _sleeping_!”

“We’ll look into it,” Athena announced. She jumped up and darted out of the room.

Casey turned back to their informant. “Thanks for your help,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone about this, and please—”

“Come _on_ , Casey,” Athena said from the doorway. She ducked back into the room and grabbed Casey by the hand. “Stay out of trouble,” she ordered the littlest recruiter firmly, and then they were off.

“I don’t suppose you have a plan?” Casey asked as Athena dragged her down a hallway and into an equipment room.

Athena turned to her with one of her more innocent-looking smiles (Casey wasn’t sure why she bothered; it wasn’t like she’d been fooled by one of those smiles in—well, certainly in months). “Why, Casey,” Athena said. “You know me. I don’t come up with plans and ideas. I just—”

“—find the people who do, yeah, yeah,” Casey grumbled. “So what do you call sticking the pin in my motorcycle helmet way back when? Sure sounds like a plan to me.”

“Well—”

“Or at least an idea.”

“Stop wasting time, Casey!” Athena replied. She was throwing supplies into bags the whole time she spoke. “Our target has already returned to Earth, supposedly on another recruiting mission. But if, as I expect, she is a human impostor, she may be reporting to whoever she’s working for, or anything at all. We have to go right away!”

“Do we even know where we’re going?” Casey pointed out.

“She was sent to California, so we’ll start there.”

“California’s a big place.”

“You’re welcome to suggest a better idea, Casey. Why don’t you accompany me through the portal while you try to come up with one?”

***

“California’s still a big place,” Casey grumbled eight hours later, leaning back in the front seat of their actually-legitimately-rented-for-once SUV with her feet propped on the dashboard. She glared out the window at the acres of dairy farms stretching as far as the eye could see.

“Yes, but we’re already more than half done,” Athena said brightly. She adjusted a dial on the detector. “See, still no sign of her! We’ve eliminated all of northern California and we’re more than halfway through central California. We’ll have her located by nightfall.”

“Unless she’s ditched her equipment,” Casey pointed out. “If she’s not the AA unit she’s supposed to be, you don’t have the main tracker to depend on.”

“Well, yes, there is that.”

“And I’m pretty sure that whether she’s an AA unit or a human, she’s not planning on recruiting any cows, so we’re wasting our time here.”

“I am driving eighty-five miles per hour except when I detect radar,” Athena said. “Any faster would simply not be safe for surrounding traffic.”

“We could take a portal.”

“If we skip over area with a portal, it would be possible for her to loop around behind us and waste all our previous work. It just wouldn’t be a good idea.”

***

Three hours later, in the midst of Los Angeles rush hour traffic, a portal was starting to sound like a better and better idea. Unfortunately, despite not being the one driving and having had nothing better to do with her time than glare at cows, adjust the settings on the AA detector, eliminate false positives here and there, and come up with ideas that were better than Athena’s, Casey had only managed to accomplish the first three of those objectives. It was impossible to rush idea generation, no matter what Athena thought.

“If Frank were here, maybe he would have come up with something by now,” Athena said.

Besides, one had to discount what Athena thought, because she never played fair. “No, he wouldn’t,” Casey responded automatically. “I mean, which one of us scored a 73 on the Feynman–Drummelberg Scale, after all?” She glared at the car in front of them. Points against it: in their way, not moving fast enough. Points in its favor: not a cow. “Do you think we should let him know we’re back on Earth?”

“That wouldn’t be possible without a great deal of work,” Athena said. “It’s simply infuriating. All Frank would tell me was that something had come up that he needed to investigate, and he claimed he couldn’t trust me not to contact him at inopportune times, so he didn’t leave any contact information at all.”

“Is that all?”

Athena sniffed. “Well, he said a few other things, but I don’t believe they’re pertinent.”

“What, were you having another tiff?”

“We weren’t—oh, look, Casey, an In-N-Out! We should stop for dinner! Maybe the traffic will have died down a bit by the time we get back on the road.”

***

As luck would have it, the traffic has lessened a small amount by the time they got back on the road. Not enough to make a noticeable difference in their rate of travel, but enough to make Athena look smug. And she only looked more smug when the detector went off halfway through Camp Pendleton, and for once it wasn’t a false alarm. Another half hour’s driving—this time not so boring, with their eyes glued to the detector—and they had narrowed their target’s location down to a city block in Carlsbad, full of restaurants and touristy shops and a couple of hotels.

Athena pulled into the first parking spot she found (ignoring the inconvenient “Parking for Taco Shop Customers Only” signs), threw the tracker and a few other pieces of equipment into her bag, and jumped from the vehicle.

“Cross at the crosswalk,” Casey hissed. “We don’t want to attract attention.”

“This close to the beach, they probably get plenty of jaywalkers,” Athena replied cheerfully, and immediately disobeyed Casey’s request.

Casey would have thrown her hands in the air, but that would also probably have attracted attention, so she settled for a frustrated sigh as she walked the barely twenty feet to the street corner and waited for the signal.

Athena was lurking outside the cafe on the corner, tapping her foot impatiently, when Casey crossed the street. As it had been barely half a minute, Casey suspected the impatience was feigned, but she decided not to call her on it. “Found anything?” she asked instead.

“It’s detecting the recruiter’s equipment but not the AA unit itself,” Athena reported. “So I believe we can safely consider her to be a human impostor. I’m still working on reducing the settings to short-range, so I’m not sure quite where she is yet.”

Casey was struck by a realization. “Wait, can all AA units be detected that way?”

“Yes, but don’t worry, I set the detector to ignore me. It’s a very simple setting. So don’t worry about false positives.”

“That’s not what I’m getting at,” Casey said. “What if somebody else around here has a detector, would they be able to figure out you’re here?”

“They certainly could,” a man said, walking up from behind them.

Casey yelped and spun around. Athena did approximately the same thing but gracefully enough that Casey suspected she would refuse to admit that she had done either. Typical.

“What the _hell_ are you doing here?” the man continued. Fortunately, it was Frank. (Well, it was fortunate in that nobody had to shoot anybody; the unfortunate part was that not being able to shoot him meant that there was no easy way to curtail the tirade he seemed on the verge of.)

“We—” Athena started.

“I have been working on this investigation for a long time,” Frank said through clenched teeth. “Not because I wanted to, but because it needed to be done. And now we’re at the final stage and ready to bust the conspiracy open, and here you come along to get in the way at the crucial moment!”

“If it was so important, why didn’t you tell me where you were going?” Athena burst out finally. “You tell me I’m important to you, but then you go off to another dimension without even a word!” 

“Why would you expect me to tell you anything?” Frank snapped back. He wasn’t quite yelling, but he certainly didn’t seem particularly concerned about not being overheard any more. “You made me think that you were going to die permanently when you told me how to disable the Monitor. You didn’t tell me you might be able to come back to me. You never tell me anything, so why should I?”

“I didn’t know whether it would work,” Athena said. “I didn’t want to give you a false hope that would hurt you more than I already had. Frank—”

This wasn’t going to be wrapping up anytime soon. Casey stepped forward to stand between Athena and Frank. “You do realize,” she said, “the impostor could be getting away while you stand here having the same argument for the twenty-seventh time?”

“Don’t be absurd, Casey,” Athena said. “It’s only nineteen...or perhaps eighteen...I don’t know if that first time really counts…”

“Don’t worry,” Frank said, actually picking up on the import of what Casey had said. “I sent one of the others in to apprehend the impostor as soon as you showed up because we thought there was a possibility she’d been tipped off by your presence. Which wouldn’t have been a problem if you had told me you were coming—”

“Well maybe if you had told us where you were going or what you were doing or even that you were in California at all,” Athena said. “Have you ever even been to California before?”

“I couldn’t tell you what I was doing,” Frank said. “You would have insisted on coming along, and you would have somehow come up with some annoying argument where your coming made perfect sense and I wouldn’t have been able to talk you out of it. But we needed to have all humans so as not to stand out or be detected.”

“Because we’re totally not standing out now,” Casey said, finally giving in to the urge to throw her hands in the air. She was still standing in between Frank and Athena, but that didn’t seem to be slowing them down at all.

“I do _not_ have annoying arguments,” Athena said. “And furthermore…”

Yep, _definitely_ not ending anytime soon. Casey stepped back to lean on a handy planter and watch the show. After all, she didn’t have anything else she needed to be doing. The impostor had presumably been apprehended, there weren’t any bystanders to need distracting from the (now full-volume) argument, and frankly the argument was kind of soothing. She’d heard it so many times by now that hearing the same old same old at least meant they didn’t have anything truly bad to be angry about. People could feel at home in the strangest places; Casey realized that for her, one of those places was anywhere that Frank and Athena were bickering.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Hospital Visit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9055222) by [lirin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/pseuds/lirin)




End file.
